The Shared Homeland Paradigm: Reimagining Space, Rights and Partnerships in Palestine-Israel

This proposal, a collaboration led by a UK-based Israeli scholar of urban politics and development planning and a US-based Palestinian scholar of constitutional and international law, aims to develop a new conceptual basis for configuring space and rights in Palestine-Israel,[1] with a view toward charting a path from the current "one-state reality" (Barnett, et al., 2023) to a two-state confederation built upon the values of equality, mutual self-determination, liberty of movement, and sovereign partnership. The proposed program of research, scenario development, and civil society engagement will contribute conceptual clarity and policy depth to the platform of A Land for All ("ALFA"), our partner organization, by elaborating the shared homeland paradigm at the center of ALFA's vision.

More broadly, our project will offer a bridge for the international diplomatic community from the moribund concept of a two-state solution it has championed for several decades to one capable of realization and grounded in values worthy of support.

Our project is designed both to develop the shared homeland paradigm and to help bring it within mainstream discourse among the public in Palestine-Israel and influential policy communities elsewhere. We will situate the paradigm in relation to relevant theoretical and discursive frameworks, preparing background papers that survey and analyse relevant comparative experience and introducing a lexicon that charts the meaning of related terms and proposes a vocabulary for elaborating the concept of partnership.

We will develop scenarios that explore the practical application of the paradigm about defined clusters of issues crucial to its viability, specifically: citizenship, residency,mobility; management of urban spaces; and environmental cooperation—drawing both on comparative experience and on field research in Palestine-Israel. In addition, through our collaboration with ALFA, we will convene live events and focus groups and create a Web-based platform to permit ongoing engagement with Israeli and Palestinian civil society, facilitating broad participation in the production of knowledge, critical appraisal of scenarios, and dissemination of analysis.

As the world marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Oslo Accords, the prospects for a two-state solution based on separation appear remote, and alternatives are garnering increasing attention from scholars, policy analysts, and diplomats. The idea of a Palestinian-Israeli confederation has elicited particularly substantial interest. However, research to date has tended to be under-theorized, lacking in practical detail, and/or remote from the public's eye.

This project will help address all three of these shortcomings. The project will work through the practical contours of the shared homeland paradigm in far greater depth than existing research, helping to rekindle political imagination among Palestinians and Israelis. In addition, the project will contribute to several fields of knowledge, exploring a novel approach to the design of norms, institutions, and geographic space in a deeply divided country, while at the same time modelling an approach to the co-production of knowledge that is consistent with the vision of partnership we envisage for Palestine-Israel.

[1] As used in this proposal, "Palestine-Israel" refers to the territory that comprised the Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948) and presently includes the State of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory (the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem).